The Nazca lines

In the desert of southern Peru, the Nazca people scraped away dark stones to make lines and huge pictures of animals and plants on the ground, best seen from the air. New figures are still being found, some with help from AI.

Date: About 100 BC to AD 700VI · The classical worldVII · After the empires
Place: The Nazca pampa · Cahuachi · The Cantalloc aqueductsThe Americas
Laid out as: A siteOne place known mainly from digging, read layer by layer from the top down.
Lessons: 5 planned, none written yet
Image: The Met Open Access, CC0
Themes: Art, architecture and design
Religion, belief and myth
Environment, climate and disasters

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

ILines in the desert
IIThe monkey, the spider and the hummingbird
IIIWho walked them?
IVWater from underground
VNew figures found from the air

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Maria Reiche
Toribio Mejía Xesspe
Masato Sakai

Objects

Nazca painted pottery
Textiles

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

100 BC to AD 700. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?